


next to godliness

by impertinences



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Freeform, Gen, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, POV Second Person, Plot What Plot, Short, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-19 01:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11303109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinences/pseuds/impertinences
Summary: His hands are always so clean.He beats a guard to death with a bat, the end made bloody, bits of brain sticking to the glossed wood, and although the gore splatters his chest, his green hair, the crooked, lopsided curve of his malicious grin, his hands are spotless.





	next to godliness

Maybe your light is the seed,  
and the darkness the dirt.  
\- "Uneven Odds"

 

 

His hands are always so clean. 

He beats a guard to death with a bat, the end made bloody, bits of brain sticking to the glossed wood, and although the gore splatters his chest, his green hair, the crooked, lopsided curve of his malicious grin, his hands are spotless. 

You should be afraid. Your brain (or what is left of it – the parts that have not been ravaged and ransacked) knows this. 

Your heart does too. 

But you gave up fear long ago. You gift-wrapped it and handed it over as a present along with your declarations of love, your promises of devotion, your desperate need to please, your sanity, your shame. When you were a doctor climbing the professional ladder, working your way from degree to degree, title to title, you often wondered about your proclivity for abandonment and your own subsequent diagnosis. Had your father seen it? Your desire to belong, to be wanted, to prove yourself, and what you would sacrifice (eagerly, willingly) in the name of acceptance? 

You were seven years old when you stole a piece of your mother’s peach cobbler from the kitchen counter. It had been left to cool, and you hadn’t been able to resist. You’d shoved spoonful after spoonful greedily into your eager mouth, sucked syrupy sweetness off of your fingers, and then left the scene of the crime with buttery crumbs still on your tongue. When your parents had confronted you, you’d owned your avarice and guilt. Your stomach had hurt by then, but you awoke the next morning still craving fresh summer fruit and sugar.

You’ve always been incapable of telling yourself no.

You can’t remember your father anymore – the electric shock had burnt away memories you no longer even know to grieve – but it doesn’t matter, it can’t matter, because the only man whose approval matters to you now is more monster than man. You used to love monsters as a little girl, you had been drawn to dark movies and their darker villains, but you had never expected to fall prey to a real-life one. Before the Joker, you had thought monsters were fantasy. 

You know better now. You know perspective can always be adjusted. Some monsters are really heroes if you read the story differently. 

The Joker taps the bat twice on the cement flooring, making a clanging noise that rattles your bones, before twirling the makeshift weapon up and over his shoulders. He drapes his lanky arms over both ends. For a moment, you think he looks like Jesus, sacrificing himself to the cross, making himself a martyr to a cause greater than you – greater than himself. 

(You’ve always seen greatness where others have looked away. You were born for this outlook.)

When he turns his smile on you, you hold out your hand. He whistles a melody from _Singing in the Rain_ when he hands you the bat. 

Does he know then that he’s making history? That his weapon – chosen without any significant though or consideration - will become yours and pave a path to infamy? Does he care? 

Do you? 

 

 

 

His cleanliness extends to multiple avenues. 

He is categorical. He has a death circle that others find threatening for reasons beyond the obvious. There are so many ways of providing death – by blade, by gun, by rope. You watch him organize it in his systematic way. You never ask the order or its meaning, why one knife is placed before another, or how a military-grade sniper rifle can skip order and be placed before a butcher’s cleaver, the sole piece of gunmetal against surgery blades, or why a sequined flapper’s dress from the 1920s somehow found its way into the mix. 

When he sits in the middle of the circle, he seems to find some semblance of peace. The manic glint to his bright eyes lessens. The fury thundering at his temples, in his veins and pulse points, stills. He grits his teeth and bares the momentary solace as though it is his penance. 

He never asks you to join. He never invites you in.

You sit at the precipice, an observer, but tolerated. 

Frost tells you once, after they break you free from Belle Reve, that the Joker used the circle the most during your absence. 

You find that kind of sweet, kind of romantic, like those great declarations of love you always pine over in rom-coms and trash novels. It isn’t a boom box held over his head in your front lawn, but it’s the same sentiment. 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a fired up world. 

Nothing makes sense anymore. 

It’s a world you’ve come to love and grieve at the same time. Once, a long time ago, you would have stumbled over this paradox. Now, you embrace it. 

There are ways to keep yourself clean of the ashes. You understand how to purge, but you still have demons to slay. 

You never think of looking to the man closest to you, his spotless hands like pale ghosts caressing your skin.

You take him inside of you instead.


End file.
